"Back in the 80s, the Commodore C-64 had an intelligent floppy drive, the 1541, i.e. an external unit that had its own CPU and everything. The C-64 would send commands to the drive which in turn would then execute them on its own, reading files, and such, then send the data to the C-64, all over a propriatory serial cable. The manual for the 1541 mentioned, besides the commands for reading and writing files, that one would read and write to its internal memory space. Even more exciting was that one could download 6502 code into the drive's memory and have it executed there. This got me hooked and I wanted to play with that - execute code on the drive. Of course, there was no documention on what code could be executed there, and which functions it could use." Very interesting. I'm most interested in how he describes others taking his work, and making it better. This would be impossible today, thanks to Microsoft, Apple, and other patent trolls.

But please make OSnews.com to what it was supposed to be again, a news site for operating system, platform and low level topics, as it was back in the Eugenia times - not your personal blog, on which you rant about software patents.

Half the topics seem to be about patents, and in stories that don't have anything to do with patents, you still try to find a way to bash patents.

And this story is a very good example. You wrote:

I'm most interested in how he describes others taking his work, and making it better. This would be impossible today, thanks to Microsoft, Apple, and other patent trolls.

Let me fix that for you: This would be impossible today, thanks to copyright law. And it was even illegal back then, it was just that neither the original author nor law enforcement cared enough.

In the F-Copy case, people did not build on top of the ideas of others, but they simply stole the core code and repackaged it.